Theda Skocpol writing in TPM: All Dems, Including Progressives Need to Back Obama on Heath Reform

[flpoljunkie]

All Dems, including Progressives, Need to Back Obama on Health Reform

By Theda Skocpol - March 5, 2010, 9:27AM

The next two to three weeks will determine whether the United States gets on a better track toward including all citizens in health coverage and controlling costs in the public interest. This is NOT the moment for Democrats to posture and bargain -- remember, this is in part what lost us MA, that mess in the Senate over the Cornhusker Kickback and other unseemly deals. Scott Brown made use of these deals -- he pointed to Democratic dysfunctionality. Speed and simplicity are crucial right now, as Obama and the House and Senate leaders put together what they must to get this done. This is a time for the Indians to listen to the Chiefs.

At the risk of irritating people on the left, this is NOT the moment for "progressives" to demand a public option. Nor is it the moment for either pro-choice feminists or pro-life Democrats to derail reform.

PROGRESSIVES need to cut the posturing over a currently unattainable (and in any event already hollowed out version of the) "public option." To get legislation now that includes massive subsidies for the uninsured and a new regulatory framework for the future requires that Nancy Pelosi -- the real heroine in all this -- persuade shakey conservative Dems in the House. The legislation cannot include a public option if she is to succeed. Yet if this new framework passes through House action and a reconcliliation side-car, that will open new political possibilities in the future. Before long, it will become very possible to enact Medicare extensions or a public option through majority budget votes, because they will be deficit-fighters. Especially "Medicare for More" which will be my new slogan. At this juncture, I hate to get emails from so-called progressive advocacy groups pushing for anything other than supporting Obama in the current end-game. Criticizing what is now attainable is the real defeatism, Adam Green! Conservatives are hammering wavering moderate Dems; use your resources to run moderate ads against private insurers in their districts. Praise the President's plan and help him get the votes. Same for MoveOn.

We will know soon if Democrats can pull together over what they have claimed for decades is a core party goal. If the posturing doesn't stop and the bills do not pass by Easter, comprehensive health reform will almost certainly go down the drain. The United States will descend further into gridlock and galloping inequalities, not least in access to basic health care.

President Obama is finally leading. The rest of us need to follow.

http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/03/05/all_dems_including_progressives_need_to_back_obama/?ref=fpblg

[whoneedstickets]

1. We're 'training' the president...

..If he shows a progressive bent, and we unite behind him while fracturing when he strays. He might get the idea that veering right is not in his interest while going left brings legislative progress and renewed public support. He's been foundering while going right, if he turns things around with a progressive swing he might take it to heart on other issues.

[damonm]

2. A - effing - MEN!

[leveymg]

3. I liked Skocpol better when she was writing about revolutions. She understands that subject better

than the politics of the pseudo-reformist 21st Century, Empire in Decline America.

The Post-Cold War American system doesn't work for structural and functional reasons. It seems doomed to crash and burn, like the old regimes of England in 1660, France in 1789, Russia in 1917, and China in 1949 for all the same reasons of sovereign debt, loss in war, inequality, mobilization of disaffected elites, and demographics that impacted the others, as she herself explained so well in her excellent treatise, States and Social Revolutions(1979).

When Obama killed the hope of Progressives by ruling to the Right-Center he pushed the United States toward collapse, civil war, and social crisis. He and the leadership of the party he leads have lost legitimacy. Both parties are now in the process of breakup, as is the post War political consensus and social contract that sustained the system through past crises.

[izzybeans]

4. Boomerang: health Care Reform and the Turn Against Government

Was one of the reasons I ditched psychology for sociology on my way to grad. school.

Theda knows quite well what is at stake. She explains your discontent in the book as well.

http://books.google.com/books?id=m5rjjScvcYoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Theda+Skocpol&client=firefox-a&cd=8#v=onepage&q=&f=false

[leveymg]

7. Read the extract - her thesis is basically that the '93 reform was paralyzed by intra-party

party divisions along class and interest group lines. The Democrats are a Party so badly divided among themselves, and tied up by dependency upon many competing lobbying groups, that any sort of fundamental reform becomes impossible, particularly when it encounters the inevitable Republican obstruction, which is unified.

The effort to extend health care to the working poor gets stymied by the competing and much better organized interests of the upper middle-class, who are the Washington pundocracy, who have excellent private health care and are well able to afford it.

Not much that I wasn't already aware of. Nothing has really changed, except that the other, overarching problems with America are infinitely worse than they were 17 years ago.

[FrenchieCat]

5. You make me laugh!

"When Obama killed the hope of Progressives by ruling to the Right-Center he pushed the United States toward collapse, civil war, and social crisis."

Obama is not a ruler.
this country has been fucked up for a long ass time.
THe country was collapsed by the time he was inaugurated.
and the only people talking about civil war are fucking fools.

[leveymg]

8. If Obama had truly been a leader, like FDR, rather than a competent technocrat, he would have

kept the popular base of the Democratic Party mobilized and involved in carrying out a truly Progressive agenda. He could have advanced that agenda if he had made it clear that he was going to push through his campaign agenda, as did Roosevelt, by public acclamation and muscle Bills through Congress with the cooperation of Senate and House leaders of his own choosing. But, you're right, Obama isn't a ruler, and isn't the 8-dimensional chess player some imagined.

Instead, Obama chose the down-the-middle, bipartisan route by appointing the Gang of Six centrists to craft the Senate HCR Bill. Yes, he got a HCR Bill through the Senate with the required 60 votes, but when the time came to craft a Reconciliation Bill, he failed to push the PO, the part that was going to make it acceptable to the Progressive Party base. By abandoning the base, he signaled that fundamental reform was going to fail again in Washington.

Barack stripped away the hope and pretense that the system, with a strong leader, responds to the people. That doesn't just doom the Democratic majority, under current conditions of economic crisis, it sets into play a process of violent breakdown in public confidence and order. When any political system loses that fig leaf of legitimacy, it fails and some level of civil conflict occurs. I'm not advocating civil war, just observing -- as does Skocpol -- that's the way societies in crisis break down.

But, it wasn't HCR that signalled the failure of the Obama interregnum. It was his earlier appointments and decisions to keep the old Wall Street crowd in charge of economic policy.

You shouldn't laugh. This is a tragedy of historical dimensions that will surely get very, very ugly. Based upon American history, this will not be a velvet revolution.

[quaker bill]

9. The smallest majority

FDR had at any point of his Presidency was 64 votes in the Senate. This quickly grew to over 80 votes. There was no need for a "gang of six" to work the center, because FDR owned the center. There is no revolution at hand. The people have been voting for candidates who believe government can do nothing for a very long time now, they have now simply gotten the product they have been voting for.

[amborin]

6. +10000

[JTFrog]

10. -10000

[IndianaGreen]

11. Senate's HCR version was NEVER 'a core party goal.'

I don't know of any Democratic Convention ever approving a plank saying that the people will be coerced by the IRS to purchase bad and expensive health policies from an out of control health insurance industry, or that they would be prevented from buying cheaper drugs from Canada.